Last Words

A friend of mine likes to introduce me to others as someone who has seen the real shit. And it's true, the story is a good one to tell - to say one worked in an evidence photography lab. It's also true to say that I know exactly what a plate glass window that fell from 40 stories high slicing through a young mother's head looks like, the blood stretching 30 feet down the gutter to a drain in the road. I have literally seen thousands of bodies twisted and torn, mutilated and emptied and even more pictures of machines and buildings, situations and accidents that normally only haunt the worried, protective parts of our darkest imagination.

The way the young women's brown hair parted, her scalp split perfectly straight open, the gash looking pink and fleshy and smooth will forever be lodged in my memory. I don't even have to close my eyes to bring it up. But that's all. I don't know her name, I don't know who she was. I don't know what the weather was like, what the blood smelled like, how long the body laid there, how long it took to clean everything up. I didn't see her five year old daughter, who was walking hand-in-hand with her mother, scream and cry. I don't even know exactly what part of Chicago the accident happened, from what building the glass fell. I don't know who came to her funeral, who is now caring for the girl, if any money was paid, if anyone was found at fault, if anyone was jailed. All I know is what it looked like.

Almost none of these images hard wired to my neurons have a narrative structure. I've written down here the few stories that I know the details of, can speak about. But of the tens of thousands of other photographs that passed before my eyes and through my hands, I simply have no way of accounting for them. I was hired to make the best of a bad situation, a technician whose only method of understanding was to get the colors right.

People say to find a job you enjoy, to do something you love. I used to think this was because a person spends so much of their time at work. Now though, I think it might mean something else, that what you do for a living, in some inscrutable way, becomes you.